Yes: System may lose its pre-eminence within five years

The University of California is in the midst of the most severe crisis in its history. In little more than a century, it has become the best public university system in the world. UC attracts enormous amounts of outside money to the state. UC San Diego, for example, ranks fifth in the country (and first in the UC system) in federal research expenditures.

Fifteen UCSD faculty members have won Nobel Prizes. Their ideas, and those of hundreds of other UCSD professors, have saved lives, created new industries, educated thousands of talented students who have gone on to enrich our society and culture. Last year, the economic impact of UCSD on our economy was some $4.6 billion, contrasted with a state contribution to our budget of $335 million. If present trends continue, however, UC will lose its pre-eminence within five years, and will be spiraling toward mediocrity. How has this come to pass?

State support for UC has been declining steadily for almost two decades. Between 1990 and 2008, it fell by 40 percent per student. Some of the difference was made up by the regrettable means of increasing student fees. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since World War II, the state has abruptly cut funding by a further 20 percent. Faculty and staff hiring at UCSD has been frozen. As our campus tries to cope with a draconian fiscal environment, campus chairs have been told that no faculty leaving in the next five years will be replaced. That will shrink our permanent faculty numbers by nearly a quarter, from 857 to 664. The ratio of students to faculty will rise to 40 to 1, a far cry from the 18.5 to 1 ratio the university once provided.

Faculty salaries were already 20 percent below those at comparable universities before the crisis, and have now been cut by an additional 8 percent through a furlough program. At some point, the temptations to leave become overwhelming for the best of our faculty. Major universities elsewhere, particularly private universities, will swoop in and cherry pick the best professors. They have already begun to do so.

So what? More than 10 percent of Californians are unemployed. Many others fear for their jobs, and they too have endured pay cuts and furloughs. Why should the University of California be spared? Of course, UC must adjust its budget, as everyone else is being forced to do. But the disproportionate cuts that have been visited upon UC are wreaking havoc on our ability to provide an extraordinary education to students at a price they can afford. We train the highly skilled work force, many with advanced degrees, that drives California's economy. Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems and MySpace were all co-founded by people holding undergraduate or graduate degrees from UC. At the end of the Cold War, San Diego lost most of its defense related jobs. They were replaced by high-paying jobs in the biotech and high-tech sectors — the Qualcomms, the Hybritechs and their smaller counterparts. The same holds true throughout the state. And UC can rightly claim the lion's share of the credit for these developments.

For every dollar California invests in research and development at UC, the faculty bring in an additional $3.89 of private and federal research money. Businesses spun off from basic UC research, lives saved through medical breakthroughs pioneered by UC faculty, technology that began in our laboratories — all these social benefits flow directly and indirectly from research at UC. The university will have contributed as much as $5.2 billion in productivity gains alone to the California economy between 2002 and 2011.

All this is at risk. So how can we avoid a dire future? We have two basic options: bring in more out-of-state money, perhaps by allowing Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD to admit a larger fraction of out-of state students as undergraduates, charging them market-rate tuition. Or recognize that the state is no longer providing the money for a 10-campus research university system and act accordingly. That is controversial. It makes explicit the need to treat campuses unequally. It would mean supporting the three most successful campuses, ones that educate 50 percent of UC students — Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD — on the more expensive research university model. Other UC campuses — Santa Cruz, Riverside, Merced — provide a fine undergraduate education to some of California's brightest high school students and should make that their primary mission. There is another, even less desirable alternative, but one preferable, in my view, to watching as the entire system is dragged into mediocrity: if all else fails, the system may have to consider closing one or more campuses. That is a horrible thing to contemplate. But better than death by a thousand cuts. Institutions that avoid hard choices as resources shrink end up like General Motors. Our state will be infinitely the poorer, literally and figuratively, if it lets great institutions like Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD become pale shadows of what they once were.

Scull is distinguished professor and chairman of the sociology department at UCSD, where he has taught for more than three decades. Prior to that, he held faculty appointments at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University.